Even after 15+ years of use you learn new [...] Now I feel stupid.
Nah! Don't be so hard on yourself.
That's just the process of learning while you are getting better. Quite normal. Nobody starts perfect.
In contrary: The more complex something is, the more features/options/ways to do something it has, the higher is the probability one day you will learn another, better way to do the same thing, and then realizing, '...if I'd known that before.' Well, yeah. But many of such things are nothing to be teached to a beginner. You need to be a bit advanced - mature, if you will - to learn even better ways. To stay in the example: Look at somebody start learning vi[m]. This person needs to learn a bunch of single characters to even do something at all with this texteditor. So, instead of teaching this already overchallenged person even more single characters at the beginning, you'd better give some other ways first. The shorter, quicker ways can be learned later, when the basics are already muscle memory.
And it's always worth to take a peek into the HB once in a while, to learn new things.
(And it also depends on the source you learn from. What you mention comes pretty early in the book "Learning the vi and Vim Editors". Anyway: Different ways of learning. And Vim is by far more complex than vi.)
but we’re stuck with editing a two‑dimensional matrix of character cells. Yes, it is the least common denominator, still it feels archaic from today’s point of view.
2D is more kind of an unavoidable side effect, an accident caused by technical reasons. In fact those are even more
archaic only 1D arrays of characters really. But unless it's some kind of a live ticker a line has to be broken at a certain length for to get reasonable formats that can be handled in a real world.
But seeing the vast majority of people is already completely overchallenged reading only one page of 2D texts the size of small book formats, and their numbers are growing even faster, since smart phones, social media and AI relieve people of reading, writing, communicating and thinking, I wonder how many geniuses will be left, capable to deal with a 3D "matrix of character cells":
And 4D - even less archaic, even more modern, would mean the whole text is in motion all the time, characters permantely swap places?
I don't know how smart you are, but I admit, I am way too stupid for that. My faculty of understanding is just quite sufficient enough to halfway deal with 2D texts. And there is still more to learn about those than my life time was enough for. I'd rather stick to those, thanks.
